Hey, friends! It’s Sunday and I’ve decided to devote each Sunday this month (well, all but the last Sunday in November, as that’s my birthday!) to a stream-of-consciousness post. The challenge: to write without a specific purpose. I just want to discuss what’s on my mind right here and now. Let’s dive in!
I’m really excited about getting a new car. My current vehicle is a 2005 Scion xB (the car that looks like a toaster!) and it’s served me incredibly well in the many years I’ve had her. She’s never needed a repair of more than a few hundred dollars and she’s got 130,000 miles on her. But many things drive me crazy about her. Like:
- Filling up my car with gas can be a frustrating experience because there’s something wrong with my gas tank in that the fuel pump will click off before the tank is full. This just happened today when I went to get gas and I had to figure out the right way to tilt the fuel pump to direct the flow of gas in a way that won’t cause the fuel pump to click off. I dream of the day when getting gas isn’t a frustrating experience!
- My power windows are losing their… power, I guess? They will roll down easily, but getting them back up is not so easy. It usually takes a few minutes of continually pushing the button and the window going up inch by inch. What this means is that I can’t ever use a drive-thru car washing station! You have to put your car window down to pay at the station right before the car wash, but then I can’t trust that my windows will go back up before the water starts! (Yes, I could just get out of my car to pay, but that’s annoying.)
- I don’t have Bluetooth. To listen to my podcasts on my phone, the volume has to be at the highest setting and I have to put my phone in a cupholder to amplify the sound. Pretty janky.
- Using my trunk takes two hands these days because a mechanism in the trunk lock is broken, so I have to use one hand underneath the bottom of the trunk to lift it up while my other hand is lodged under the handle of the trunk to push the lock to open it. Sounds complicated? That’s because it is. I never use my trunk anymore because it’s too annoying.
Those are just some of the annoyances I have with my current car. I’m just ready for a new car and I know it’s the right time to make this purchase. A lot of the things I want with a new car are just stuff that comes standard in cars these days, like Bluetooth, a backup camera, a power liftgate, etc. I’m not looking for the flashiest car—truly anything will be an upgrade to what I have right now.
I’ve also never had a new car. I never thought I could have a new car. Growing up poor, we had our fair share of embarrassingly ugly and decrepit cars. There was the car that a friend said she thought was going to fall apart every time I got in it. There was the gray station wagon with two huge dents on its right side. There was the time my mom drove a church van for a while—that was fun. There was the little Ford that had rope holding its hood closed. There was the car that would take forever to back out of a parking space because of how many times it would stall when in reverse.
So I’m excited about the chance to have a new car. And I’m also really grateful that I can. I’m grateful that I have the means to make this happen for me, that I will be able to put down a sizable down payment, that I won’t have to worry about affording a car payment. I don’t take that for granted at all.
